Victor Davis Hanson: Jasmine Crockett’s Defense of Karmelo Anthony Is Absurd

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: So, Victor, let’s turn again to the Karmelo Anthony case, just for a minute. We did talk on Friday about it. But Jasmine Crockett—who probably doesn’t deserve press, but since she kind of represents an extreme segment of the United States, we’ll give her some attention here. After the trial verdict and sentencing, she got on a podcast and said that the knife was not really a weapon, basically, that it was just too small and who could consider it a weapon?

I think she was trying to argue with the murder charge. I don’t know. She didn’t actually say that.

Victor Davis Hanson: She’s a lawyer, and she’s such an ignoramus. She really is. She reminds me of Graham Platner. He was from the upper-upper-upper middle class, and then he plays Joe Working Man, Oyster Man, while his dad’s friend gives him an island to work on, and his mom is his only customer. And he went to a prep school, right?

She’s the same way. She grew up in an upper-upper-middle-class family in the suburbs, and then she created, she didn’t develop it naturally, this inner-city ghetto accent. She uses that and gets sassy, and then when she gives a serious interview, she turns it off, and she’s acting as if she’s a professional.

But she’s also an abject racist. All she talks about is white, white, white. White people, white people, white people, white people. Well, I said ignoramus without being defamatory, but evidential. She doesn’t understand the law. What does it matter if I take a rock and hit someone—if you took a rock and smashed Metcalf’s head, the rock is a murder weapon. It doesn’t matter if there was a two-by-four in the tent and he charged him and hit him with a two-by-four. That’s a murder weapon. The only distinction is if it’s illegal to carry a knife of a particular—then that’s an accessory felony. But that doesn’t matter, because that’s an accessory charge. The main charge is murder—using a murder weapon. It could be a rock, it could be a two-by-four, it could be a piece of steel, it could be a knife, it could be a gun.

But she’s all hung up on that. And then she almost implied—she said, if somebody was beating me down and was 300 pounds, I wouldn’t just restrict myself to the fists.

Everything about that was a lie. He doesn’t weigh 300 pounds. He weighed 35 or 40 pounds more than Karmelo, and he was about the same size.

And more importantly, he didn’t beat him down and knock him down. He sat there—about 15 times, he said to everybody, I’m not leaving, and what are you going to do about it?

Then finally, he said he didn’t want to fight, but he gently tapped him back. That’s not beating you down.

So, then she’s suggesting that he beat him down, he weighed 300 pounds, and then he had no choice to stab him through the bone into the heart, and then she would do the same thing. That’s what she was implying.

And then, the worst was when they unleashed those thugs that were outside the courtroom. And the family came out, and they said, we’re going to urinate on your son, your brother’s grave. And people on social media said, go check his tombstone. I’ve already smeared feces on it.

It was horrible, just pre-civilizational.

All these things. Now we hear that Decarlos Brown is going to sue the FBI, who cut a poor [Ukrainian] immigrant’s throat. And we had a young kid walking near his home in Philadelphia, and what happened? Two people came up, African American young people, and they stole his phone. He asked for it back, and they shot him and killed him. Killed him right in front of his house.

This is all happening at once. Then you superimpose that on what’s happening in Belfast, or with the attempted beheading and blinding of a person. And people are starting to realize that there is a common thread. It transcends just illegal immigration.

The thing is, if you create in the West this binary, which Barack Obama started, that it’s not black-white anymore, it’s non-white versus white, and class does not matter. The Sikh family can be millionaires, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s family, who’s Hindu, or Sikh truck drivers can be driving for a multimillion-dollar trucking firm, but they’re victims. Therefore, they don’t have to have a license the way everybody else has had to get one.

But if you start saying that these people have innate grievances that have to be conceded by the majority, and you keep demonizing white, white, white, white, white, white, white, and then you add to that the idea that they can’t do anything, and ha ha, I’m a Sikh guy, and I just took out my ceremonial sword that they let me have and which they don’t let anybody else have, even though it was probably 8 inches rather than 5. And then you stab somebody and you think, ha ha, the fact that I had this weapon and I used it means they gave me preferential treatment. And the fact that all I have to do is hit the race button and they’ll come out here and exonerate me, as I kind of show them a superficial little thing on my eye. And then my family can hide the weapon and say he’s a racist, and they’ll let him bleed to death.

That’s all predicated on the idea that I’m protected.

And when you add the idea of immigration into it, that you come to a foreign country, and this is the Irish and British indigenous population, and you give them exemptions and entitlements, and then they reward that magnanimity with ingratitude and anger, then it’s time to call an end to it.

And here in the United States, if you, like Jasmine Crockett, and if you, like half the [Congressional] Black Caucus, cannot finish a sentence without saying white, white, white, and the whole intention of the civil rights movement, according to Martin Luther King Jr., the archetypal leader, was to downplay race: the content of our character, not the color of our skin.

But it has been accentuated with DEI because it is a get-out-of-jail ticket, and it is a ticket on the fast track to employment, promotion, retention. All you have to do is play a minority person, and you’re going to get preferential treatment.

And the final absurdity, as I said last time, when you have three generations of Americans, for that matter Europeans, that were born after the civil rights movement, passed civil rights legislation, passed, they grew up not with Jim Crow, not with institutionalized discrimination, not with Lester Maddox, not with George Wallace, but affirmative action, affirmative action, DEI. And they went along with it, as everybody did. Yet, at the end of that three-generational, in 2026, racial relations are a lot worse.

Because the more that you claim that a particular tribal group, white people, owe you something for something that happened that they had no part in, and especially to a group that doesn’t understand the present—Jasmine Crockett doesn’t know what segregation was. And so it’s not sustainable.

And after the Karmelo Anthony verdict, they showed pictures of black people going up and hitting white people. One guy was on a bike. Did you see that? He just knocked him off and said, you’re a juror. He wasn’t. Then he tried to go to a bus stop and attack a couple.

That’s not sustainable because what’s finally going to happen, the elite white who created this, the left-wing elite white is going to find out that they’re not exempt. Because the people who are racist who are attacking white people don’t care about their politics. In fact, they have contempt for the elite white because they feel they’re a lot easier prey.

They don’t go down to rural Alabama and do it. They don’t come out here to southern Fresno County and attack the Hispanic population or the Oklahoma diaspora. They never do that.

They go into big cities where they’re in the plurality, and then they attack tourists or other people. But they have no idea that America is not the faculty lounge at Stanford, white America. It is not John Kerry and Bernie Sanders. It isn’t. It’s the deplorables, and they’re not going to put up with it.

And you can see what’s happening in Britain.

And it’s tragic because when you have people like Jasmine Crockett and they’re not being cross-examined, then the entire Black community suffers, even though they’ve got brilliant people. They have to speak out about it.